Norton Mezvinsky: Has He Gone too Far in His Criticism of Israel?

Central Connecticut State University, situated in New Briton and making up
one part of a four-campus state university system, has a pattern of acute
political bias when it comes to the Middle East.

Campus Watch began posting articles on CCSU as early as June 2002, and added
a full survey page in January of 2003.

CCSU offers neither a prominent scholar in Middle East studies nor an established
program in this field. Rather, it makes its mark through teach-ins and conferences;
events run more like political rallies than scholarly inquiries. Then, far
from doing anything to stem these tendencies, documents made available to
Campus Watch reveal an administrative pattern  that goes all the way
to the top of the university system administration  of ignoring this
bias, concealing it, and rewarding it.

On November 8, 2000, CCSU faculty members Ghassan El-Eid and Norton Mezvinsky,
plus Palestinian activist Mazin Qumsiya, and Stephen Fuchs, a local rabbi
invited at the last minute, held a teach-in on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict co-sponsored by the colleges Center for International Education.[i]
Some faculty cancelled classes and required their students to attend the event,
with the result, notes Barry Gordon of the media watch group Promoting Responsibility
in Middle East Reporting (PRIMER), that a captive audience was subjected
to seventy minutes of anti-Israel rhetoric, and then ten minutes of the pro-Israel
perspective.[ii] The central theme of the event was to compare Israel
with Nazism and apartheid.

(The full PRIMER report is available at Campus Watch at www.campus-watch.org/survey/id/43.)

[Editor: One of the speakers at the event, Norton Mezvinsky, is a professor
of history at CCSU; Harris identifies Mezvinsky as "an anti-Zionist"
who "lionizes Elmer Berger, an agitator who denied the existence of a
Jewish people." Mezvinsky is co-editor of a "collection of articles
in 1989 titled Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections."]

According to teachers reports, Mezvinsky informed the class that the
well-armed and well-funded Israelis, fought the Palestinians in 1948,
but did not mention that armies of five Arab countries first invaded the U.N.-sanctioned
Jewish state. He blamed only Israel for the Palestinian refugee problem and
never mentioned the estimated 800,000 Jewish refugees simultaneously expelled
from Arab lands. Mezvinsky accused Israel of granting minimal rights to non-Jews,
despite the fact that Arab citizens of Israel vote, sit in parliament, and
have greater political and religious freedoms than do other Arabs anywhere
else in the Middle East.[xv] One of the things that Mezvinsky said over
and over again is that Israel is a terrorist state, one participant
recalls....

So great was the public outcry over Mezvinskys lecture, however, CCSU
momentarily awoke. The events organizer, Richard Benfield was quoted
in the New Briton Herald calling Mezvinskys lecture more inflammatory
than informational.[xx] President Judd scolded Mezvinsky. From
what I have been advised, wrote Judd, you breeched [sic] the tenets
of what I asked the faculty in this program to do....

In December of 2002, Norton Mezvinsky was rewarded for his extremism by being
named a CSU Professor, an honor reserved for faculty members
who fulfill the highest ideals of outstanding teaching, scholarly achievement
and public service.[xxiv] An associate professor of history at CCSU,
Katherine Hermes, declared Mezvinsky everything that a CSU professor
stands for.

Even apart from the record noted above, this honor is puzzling. Mezvinskys
1999 book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, co-authored with the late Israel
Shahak, offers his interpretation of religious groups in Israel; it is noteworthy
primarily for its erroneous depictions of Judaism. Mezvinsky declares that
For religious Jews, the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value; for
Likud, it has limited value.[xxvi] He asserts that under Jewish law,
the killing by the Jew of a non-Jew under any circumstances is not regarded
as murder.[xxvii] He inaccurately puts forth fringe views as representative
of the Israeli polity, for instance citing rabbi Yitzak Ginsburgh, a radical
theocratist who lauded Baruch Goldstein and wrote Jews killing non-Jews
does not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion and the killing
of innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue. Mezvinsky
falsely protrays this as a widespread Israeli opinion.

(Mezvinsky claims the quotations are out of context. I made several attempts
for him to respond to the above quotations, but he made untenable demands
to have his comments presented unedited and unabridged that I could not accept.)
Diana Muir, a frequent reviewer for the Boston Globe and Christian Science
Monitor, finds that Mezvinskys book frequently substitutes his bias
for knowledge. Beyond the malicious absurdity of its premise,
wrote Muir, Mezvinskys work is riddled with undocumented slurs
and falsehoods presented as fact.

More Comments:

Jessica M. Ramer -
12/23/2004

I read your article with great interest as I know Norton Mezvinsky personally. I published a one-paragraph account of my experiences with him in an amazon.com review of his book.

I later got two very angry voice mail messages telling me that he had retained a lawyer and would sue if I didn't remove the post within a week. The deadline he offered me fell on Christmas Eve day. I wondered why if he had retained a lawyer that *he* was contacting me instead of the law firm to which he had paid money.